Regents propose plus/minus grades

The Board of Regents is looking to implement a three year pilot program for a plus/minus grading system and has asked Tech to participate. The program would include a plus/minus system in students’ transcripts and grade point averages.

“Basically, instead of simply A, B, C, D and F,” said Andy Smith, vice provost for Academic Affairs, “the system would be A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D and F.”

Several factors are still undecided in the implementation of the plus/minus system. In the general application of the system, the Board of Regents has offered Tech three options.

“We can choose to have the plus and minus affect GPA. We can have the plus and minus only on the transcript, but not affect GPA,” Smith said. “Or we can choose to not implement the program at all.”

The weight of the “+” and the “-“ also still has to be determined.

“What most schools typically do—though there are some exceptions—is give a third of a point for a plus and subtract third of a point for a minus,” Smith said.

A study conducted by Arizona State University in the fall of 2002 on the plus/minus system showed that mean GPAs with the plus/minus system and those without had little difference. What the study concluded was that the system did not help curb grade inflation but simply increased grade accuracy.

The ability to give more precise measurements of a student’s performance is what administrators and professors looked for when they proposed the change to the current grading system.

“For example, if I have a student who got an 81 and one who got an 89, I know there is a huge amount of difference in the work that those students put in to get those grades, but there is no way to differentiate between the two,” Smith said.

“Personally, I would like to see the system in place,” he said. “It gives the students more precise feedback and differentiates better what the student’s performance actually is.”

Smith acknowledged that it was not solely up to him to decide whether or not the new system went into affect.

“[The new system] is not something that should be dictated by the faculty,” Smith said. “It is something that should be dictated by the students. I feel the students should make the decision whether or not to implement the program. I will ask the Academic Affairs Committee and the SGA to give me advice on the matter.”

According to Smith, however, many students are against the plus/minus system.

“Students feel there is too much emphasis on grades, and this would increase that emphasis,” Smith said. “However, what it does give the student is a more precise measure of performance.”

“The first time I talked about [the program] was at the Leadership Retreat last week,” he said. “There was a lot of resistance to it at the conference. It was just a discussion, but I found a lot of students there have had a negative reaction to it.”

“I do not know really how I would feel about that [type of system],” said Blake West, a fourth-year Industrial Engineering major. “I don’t think I would like losing a third of a point for simply getting a minus on a grade.”

If the new system passes through the student government in the next few weeks, students will be seeing pluses and minuses next to their grades as soon as this summer term.